Early this month, Milwaukee voters approved a referendum concerning paid sick days. It requires the city to pass a law, mandating all employers to provide workers with paid sick time. For small companies, it would be five days a year; for larger firms, nine days. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce announced it’s filing a lawsuit to stop the law from being implemented. The MMAC is holding a conference to gather support for its case. WUWM’s LaToya Dennis spoke with officials in the two other American cities that passed similar ordinances.
San Francisco was the first city in the country to mandate paid sick leave. That was nearly two years ago. Greg Asay is an analyst with the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement there. He says there were concerns, similar to the MMAC’s, that the city would become less attractive to business. While there has not been a study of the impact of paid sick leave in his city, Asay says economic markers are positive.
“The number of businesses that were registering with the city, opening new businesses, continued to increase after the law took effect and had been in effect for quit sometime. And the city’s unemployment rate remained and remains lower than California as a whole, even during these recessionary times,” Asay says.
And yet, Asay says, once the law was passed, unanswered questions popped up that hadn’t been anticipated. So he says the city allowed the public to weigh in for three months to help clarify the ordinance.
“For example, it said that employers may require reasonable notice by an employee when the employee is planning to use sick leave or needs to use sick leave. Similarly, the law said employers may require reasonable verification from the employee that the employee was using sick leave. Well the word reasonable needed to be flushed out and defined and that’s what we did through our rule making process. So now there’s very clear guidelines for both employers and employees to look at,” Asay says.
Asay says he hopes the process San Francisco went through to further clarify its law will help other cities. But that undertaking has not yet helped Washington D.C. It was the second municipality to enact a similar law six months ago. Janene Jackson is with the D.C Chamber of Commerce.
“How have things been going?” “Not well, not well at all. Part of the challenge is that the bill does not have regulations yet. The department of employment services is currently working on drafting regulations, but the bill is in effect without employers and employees even knowing what they’re supposed to do under the law. We have the basic outline of what’s required, but how certain provisions of the legislation will be interpreted—that’s still up in the air,” Jackson says.
Jackson says the bottom line is that no one knows who should be accruing sick leave and when it should start. And she says that’s not the only problem. Just as in Milwaukee, the D.C. chamber of commerce worries the law will drive business away.
“We are convinced that there will be some businesses that will pull up shop,” Jackson says.
And Jackson does not expect those to be small local businesses.
“It’ll probably be national who lets say they have maybe two employees here and they just decide to move across you know the river, to Arlington. Or to go into Maryland, you know Bethesda or Silver Spring because they can move that office because it’s small and you know just move it to one of the surrounding suburbs or surrounding cities just so that they don’t have to comply with the law,” Jackson says.
Jackson says she wouldn’t be surprised if organizations filed a lawsuit against the District of Columbia for forcing them to adhere to a law that has not been clarified. Right now though, it appears the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce may become the first to challenge the legality of such a law.
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